September 2010 Entries

Writing apps for the WP7? Interested in learning more about the platform? Like beer? If you've answered yes to any of these questions, come join us at the Kings Head Pub on Thursday October 7th at 6pm.! We'll be having an informal get together to talk about the WP7, and share our collective experiences working on this platform. Joel Semeniuk (Imaginets) has offered up his loaner WP7 phone for us to hack around with, so anyone who'd like to share / show-off their applications or works-in-progress, ......

It’s that time of the year when the local Winnipeg technology communities start ramping up! There are two group events this month to be aware of: .NET UG – September 21 Amir Barylko presents Iron Ruby and .NET: A Match Made in Heaven! Ruby is an awesome language that is quite popular nowadays. The beautiful expressive syntax of Ruby and the tools and frameworks that have been built around it (Rake, Rails, Sinatra, rSpec, Cucumber, etc) makes it an excellent candidate to match a wide variety of our ......

So last night I started seeing the #oow10 hashtag show up on Twitter, along with comments about cloud computing, Oracle, and how horrible the HP portion of a presentation was. Turns out that OOW10 stands for Oracle Open World 2010, Oracle’s annual conference. They were live streaming the keynote and Larry Ellison was on the stage so I thought I’d check it out. First thought of the presentation was how unpolished it seemed. Keep in mind that all the tech-related keynotes I’ve seen have been at Microsoft ......

Tonight kicked off the new season of The Apprentice: the TV show where Donald Trump parades a bunch of business-types through a series of tasks, fires the failures, and at the end hires the lucky schmuck that survived the whole ordeal. All with us watching the drama unfold! This season we see Trump bring in people affected by the recent recession. They’ve lost their jobs, lost their businesses, sold their houses, had their marriages destroyed, etc. Unfortunately we see their first task as being more ......

It’s that time of year again…time when schools all over Manitoba send out their students into the wild armed with everything from chocolates to coupons to sell and raise money for school activities. My daughter’s school is raising money for a new swing set and is selling the Show and Save Discount Card and Coupon Book! Both have fantastic offers, including $20 worth of Sobeys coupons (1 - $10 off $100 and 2 - $5 off $50) in addition to discounts/coupons for restaurants, entertainment, golf, merchandise ......

One of the guys here at Protegra, Paul Jones, has been dabbling in XNA development for the better part of the last year. He’s just got his first indie game, That Orange Guy, available on the XBox Live Marketplace under Indie games! It’s a platformer similar to Mega Man, but with a lot more orange than blue and cell shading instead of anime-style beasties. Talking with Paul, he’s very excited about XNA development and very proud of his game. But he’s also sort of shy, so I thought I’d help spread ......

Disclaimer: I’m not an IT Pro, I’m a hobbyist hardware guy at best. The below post is a recount of my experience but modifying anything in your system is done at your own risk. If in doubt, seek professional help. I’ve been having issues with my system crashing while playing Star Craft 2. I rebuilt my system about a month ago into a pretty decent gaming system (not crazy by any measure, I’m not an overclocker, but very capable). Over that time I’ve had random system crashes while playing. Examining ......